In this June 15, 2011, file photo, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates testifies regarding the Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2012 budget request before the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Defense on Capitol Hill in Washington.

1.
White House micromanagement

He describes laboring mightily to “resist the magnetic pull exercised by the White House, especially in the Obama administration, to bring everything under its control and micromanagement.”

Indeed, he writes, the “controlling nature” of the White House staff “took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level.”

That said, in one of the sometimes contradictory pivots that the defense secretary to two presidents makes frequently in his book, Gates adds that he had “no problem with the White House driving policy” since “the bureaucracy at the State and Defense Departments rarely come up with big new ideas, so almost any meaningful change must be driven by the president and his National Security staff.”

Even Gates, admired by both sides of the political aisle, had trouble getting things accomplished. He writes that “despite everyone being ‘nice’ to me, getting anything consequential done was so damnably difficult – even in the midst of two wars.”